Thursday, December 25, 2014

Adventures

FN11 - Amulet of Dorian Beldor - This week's Adventures in Filbar product is a mid to high level adventure: The Amulet of Dorian Beldor begins as a race to catch a fugitive from
justice and quickly escalates into a much larger problem. With over 40
pages and 8 different maps this adventure has your party stumbling onto a
former city covered by a rock slide now inhabited by a large group of
humanoids. $3, 42 pages.

Most notably, Dragon's Rage is an adventure that is largely statless, but has standard D&D features, and Renegade (and Renegade Corruption) which are OSR style fantasy games (not really retroclones, but more neo-clones)

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

I don't know how I missed this (thanks to Eric Andres for mentioning it to me), but over on Kickstarter is a new project to bring out a series of 1e folio adventures. While the art is clearly quite different (though some interior art is apparently by Jim Holloway), it will have the detached cover with the map inside like the old modules (and not something you can do at POD printers)

My Project:The Folio is a 1st Edition gaming module. It
will be produced as an 8x11”, removable cover [11x17" once removed], adventure with mostly b/w interior
artwork. The final size is 30 pages of content. Who’s it for? ALL gamers, both
new gamers and old gamers as it is easily expandable or playable as is.The concept is to allow gamers a starting
point for adventure that can be modified to their liking while providing
excellent reference content and framework.The base mechanic will be for 1st Edition, but I’ve designed
it to be readily modified to any fantasy game.What’s in it? All original
content. It has been written by myself and my OSR compatriot Mark Timm, with incredible cover art from old school masters and
interior artwork by skilled black and white illustrators Travis Hanson and
Michael Wilson, and even a bit of Jim Holloway because I can never get enough
Holloway. We are intent on providing a polished and modern design with creatively
nostalgic content that transcends a particular age. The Folio will contain
a 3-D map, a Gazetteer, a monster section, a new monster unique to the
setting,
DM’s notes and guides, and a full adventure.

Also very reasonably priced, $5 for a PDF, $15 for a print copy. So check it out.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Adventures

FQ1 - Ruins of Heliopolis - This weeks Adventures in Filbar product, the first in the Filbar Quest line of adventures, meant for starting characters. 21 pages, $3

Starter Adventures - Starter Adventures is targeted toward introduing a new player into
RPGs. Inside are four short adventures for each of the four main
classes, a tavern to hangout in, and a full-fledged adventure when
they've got enough blood encrusted on their blades. . 51 pages, $7.99

Misc

Five Henchmen - Five Henchmen Has writeups
for Bill and Glave, the Guisarme Brothers, as well as their friends
Becky Corbin, 'Little' Bill Hook. amd Hal Bard. Each one comes with
their own stats, equipment, personality, motivations, and backstory. It
also holds the story of how they ended up as mercenaries and part-time
adventurers. Pay What You Want, 9 pages, several puns.

Mead & Mayhem - This is a tavern and bar fighting supplement. 6 pages, Pay What You Want (suggested price $3)OSR Oddness Bundle - Three products: Little Devils, an adventure; Fetishistic Arcana, a magic sourcebook; and Mutations Mutable which I don't know what is, exactly. $2.75, a $1 cheaper than buying all of them separately.

Darts have always been somewhat strange in D&D, they can be overpowered due to their high rate of fire, especially if weapon specialization is used. But at the same time, you think, "Darts? What can darts do?"

And yet, the movie I'm watching now on the El Rey Network, Temple of the Red Lotus, features expert dart throwers leaving a bloody trail using just darts.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

This is not OSR news, but I stumbled across a video for the space synth song Dragon's Legend that featured video from the game Dragon's Lair (which the song samples, actually).

Back in the day, I had never made it very far in the game (it was all about memorization) so it was neat seeing the whole (or most of it) quest. Presumably the whole game is someplace on youtube, but I am a fan of the song and the guy did a good job syncing it.

Monday, December 15, 2014

That's weird, after months of nothing OSR related on Lulu, on back to back days there are new items. Today, it's Original Edition Delta: Book of Spells: 2nd Edition, available in both print and pdf for $8 and $6 respectively.

A concise, comprehensive collection of magic spells for use with the
"original edition" fantasy game rules (as published by Gygax &
Arneson, 1974-1975). A handy supplement for both DMs and players of
wizard characters. Now revised & edited with extra care for the 2nd
Edition! All of the spells have been refined and polished to let their
essential facets shine brightly -- bringing them in even closer
alignment with the original game. It's easier than ever for DMs and
players to use and remember any wizard spell at the table without
slowing down the game.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

The Book of Elder Magic is a handy reference designed for use at the
gaming table by players and Gamemasters alike, playing Classic,
Original, and Retroclone rulesets of the worlds most popular RPG,
including our own Champions of ZED. It contains over 42 pages of spells
for Clerics and Magic-users including all those found in the Original
1974 Edition, and many more spells inspired by Dave Arneson and the
original Twin Cities ganers and also spells adapted from Arneson's Open
Game sources.

Not sure if there is a PDF version someplace, but the print version is 72 pages and costs $11.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Adventures

Barrowmaze Complete - This is a megadungeon from Greg Gillespie. It's appeared before in two parts along with illustration and map books, but this gathers it together into one product. $40 for the PDF, $75 for the hardback, and 260 pages. I can't honestly say that's a bad deal for what you get, but it just illustrates how good a deal Dwimmermount is (which is 400 pages and $10 for the PDF, $40 for the hardback)

Food Fight - A new adventure from the Gagmen Revelry in Torth - The third adventure from Venger Satanis, whose work is probably the closest you can get to Heavy Metal (the magazine) in terms of modules. Little pricey though at $10 for 39 pages. Aimed at low level characters.

The Unholy Land - Hex crawl set in the Holy Land. A lot more dinosaurs there than I thought. PWYW, suggested price $2.99, 20 something pages.

Rules

By This Poleaxe - I missed this, it's a free set of rules to run skirmish level mass combat in Labyrinth Lord and similar systems.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Judea, the year 2 BCE. Sometime soon, a baby will be born that will
change the course of human history. This even is heralded by the arrival
of a star, an omen shining down. The expenditure of divine power has
thinned the barriers between worlds and times. Monsters, demons, undead,
and antediluvian creatures all stalk the deserts and hills of Judea.
Kings, demons, and cults have read the signs and know the star means
their doom. They will do anything to kill the prophesied child and
maintain their power.Unholy Land is an old-school hex-crawl campaign for
mid-level characters taking place in Judea around the time of the birth
of Jesus Christ. What better way to celebrate the holidays?

While I don't use miniatures any more, back when I was a kid playing D&D, we did, at least for marching order.

Back then, we'd pick a miniature and then base a character around it. I remember one character that drove my DM crazy, I thought it looked like he had a toad on his helmet. So I kept pushing for him to have a toad familiar. And my DM (rightfully in retrospect) said it was just a horse ornament (I guess maybe it was a Rohan inspired figure).

Anyway, Hero Forge allows you to make your own custom figure. Pretty neat. (They seem to be overloaded right now, takes a while to load)

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Adventures

A Red & Pleasant Land - Perhaps more of a setting than adventure, for LotFP. Seems to be very much Alice in Wonderland-ish, not literally (like Dungeonland), but very much inspired by it. 197 pages, $14.99

This is sort of cheating as a news item, since I made it, but I just released the first (of hopefully) a number of modules, HS1 The Lost Shrine of Sirona. It's meant for first edition and for 5-7th level characters, though I ran it for a 5th/6th level party and they found it kinda easy, but they also had 9 characters total, which complicates things.

It's a very short, fairly simple dungeon crawl, 9 rooms and 2 pages. I've been working on a much longer (80 room) dungeon, but I wanted to release something short and simple as a test.

Edit:

Slightly updated version — Fixed a couple typos, added AL to critters I forgot to, and added a monster xp summary in the Notes. Which as it varies from rules system to rules system, might be off, but it's more or less the 1e xp values (I also round)

I was a backer of Wasteland 2 (and I also wrote that character program included in Wasteland 1) and was a big CRPG fan in the '80s. One of my favorites was The Bard's Tale. Well, In-Xile is hinting at a new version

Along with continued tuning of Wasteland 2, myself and a few others at
the studio are beginning to work on another RPG that has been
passionately demanded of us for a while now! It’s still quite early in
the process, but we will have more news on that in the New Year.

At least that's the obvious thing, though I guess it could be Neuromancer or Stonekeep.

Monday, December 1, 2014

This adventure should challenge even experienced groups. Parties who
charge in with guns blazing will most likely die in their attempt.
Figuring out what you are up against and then figuring out how to deal
with the problem are both difficult.

About This Site

As a long time D&D fan who was lured back and then disappointed by the 5e announcement, I was thrilled to discover there was a whole bunch of people making products for old school versions of the game, either adventures and sourcebooks, or variations of the old rules.

But there was little in the way of news about new products, other than scattered comments on various message boards and sometimes not even that. So I thought I'd collect all the news I could find, as well as write the occasional review.

If you happen to have any news pertaining to OSR products, drop me a line at trancejeremy at yahoo.com